US election brings BBC News website traffic high

The US election brought the highest traffic to the BBC News website so far this year, the corporation has revealed.

Coverage of the election, which saw Barack Obama appointed for a second term, brought 16.4 million unique browsers across the BBC website and mobile services on November 7. This included 8.1m from the UK.

He said that UK usage figures on Wednesday were 50% higher than the average for 2012, and non-UK browsers were 75% higher than average.

"We spent a lot of time working out how to provide the best possible service on mobile, so it's encouraging to see that nearly 5m mobile devices visited BBC News Online [on Wednesday], a record figure for us on mobile, accounting for about 30% of all users," Hermann added.